on fornice there is only one relevant question: are you of the green faction or the blue faction?
hard competition, both team and individual, is how the people on fornice live. there they take the concept of "survival of the fittest" very seriously. while they disdain outright killing and the concept of total war or victory as such at all costs they see the struggle, the attempt to dominate and win, as defining of human existence and illustrative of the human will to exist. the baseline consideration in any competition is that the opponent must remain free to act to their full capacity - assassination, sabotage, and other forms of undermining are despised - and must be defeated "fair and square", any other method is seen as being at odds with truth and reality. both males and females compete (in fact in some ways these two groups form two more factions that cross between the green and the blue), if not always against each other then frequently in parallel, with the females having the additional field of demographics and child production.
all of forny society is organized into nested and sometimes interlocking teams, the whole of which are loosely resolved into two planet-wide factions - the green and the blue. these are loosely associeted with two halves of the planet but members and teams of both factions can be found throughout fornice. within these factions are internal teams which incorporate yet more internal teams - corporations, industries, research, schools, farm co-ops, agencies, cities, families, and individuals.
while competition is widespread throughout the civil, business, scholastic, and service sectors it is in sports that it finds full-throated expression. most original terran, most new solomani, the tiny handful of vilani, and some of the curious zhodani sports, along with many specific to fornice, are all closely followed by millions of fanatics, with the most popular having literally billions of adherents.
and not only the field participants compete, but also the fanatics in the audience spaces compete with each other in parades, demonstrations, shout-downs, and morale expositions. media and businesses get in on the action according to their team and factional loyalties, and whole cities will shut down for major decision events. most other worlds have their sports fans but forny fanatics' celebrations in the stands and on the streets and in the spaceports are awesome to behold. more than one inbound spaceship has found the fornice port authority a little slow to respond during big games, and many major shipping firms time their arrivals around such events.
the actual sports involved range from mildly hazardous to last-man-standing fatal. by far the most popular is the tactical team marathon, played out in the open in fornice's low g environment, involving the full range of survival fitness - personal strength, personal agility, personal stamina, personal battle skill, personal intelligence, and teamwork, all oriented towards, not just wounding or killing, but achieving a goal before the other team. forny's have been playing this game for centuries and have an entire museum dedicated to past marathons, the glorious winners and the honored losers who fought to the bitter end and never quit. another game popular not only on fornice but throughout the spinward marches is grav bike knights, famous for its color and pomp and ceremony and chivalry and viciously violent action seen from cameras mounted on the helmets and bikes and lance points of the participants. one of the more curious is battle curling, based on the ancient terran "sport" of curling, where the participants not only compete in who gets their stone across the finish line first but also engage each other more directly on the ice with quarterstaves, ranging from hollow plastic poles to heavy oak clubs. not many males play this one but the females seem to love it. this game is more spectated off fornice than on it, probably because ... well, because it's funny to watch them fall on their ass on the ice and chase each other's stones, trying to move their own and hinder their opponent's while thwacking away at each other. also fornice is part of the moran march and for centuries the moran males have come to fornice to participate in the cage fights. so far the moran males have won 51% of the matches but this ratio has been declining for a century. every such fight is accompanied by literally hundreds of thousands of fornys chanting "THIS YEAR THIS YEAR THIS YEAR THIS YEAR ...."
fornice is run by a civil service bureaucracy called the referee board. in general that is exactly what they do - referee the forny competitors in all aspects of their lives. the fornys don't respect their referees - "those who can't do, ref" - but acknowledge the necessity of them. when a corporation gets too big or a university monopolizes certain fields of study or a sports team becomes too dominant or a family becomes too influential and controlling the referees often move to break up the entity to encourage free competition.
fornys consider the rest of the spinward marches to be a little soft, if exciting at times. in the imperial services and merchant marine operations they are always driving very hard to dominate, to win, to win according to the rules, and to win well. they function equally well as lone individuals (though hoping for an audience and feeling free to advertise themselves) and as team players. they tend to be a bit fast-moving, gaudy, and flashy, and proud of it. if other fornys are around they will coalesce into their various homebound factions and teams, including their one big team of fornice in the face of any threat to all of them. females may tend to look for big strapping intelligent males to father children they can bring home to, and show off at, fornice.
many fornys talk openly of the need for psionic games on fornice. the zhodani, however, they view as poisonous vermin that need to be eliminated at every opportunity. in the imperial navy and marines on the zhodani frontier no-one is more attentive to their duties in opposing the zhodani than the citizens of fornice.
some fornys rebel against fornice's materialist competitive environment and leave to form cooperative communes or other non-competitive social structures. in particular are the "formers", fornys who have developed space merchant communes who roam the spinward marches like gypsies, sharing their ships and families as they make their living through non-competitive trade.